The dynamics in today's telecommunications market are placing more pressure than ever on networked services providers to find new ways to compete. With high penetration rates and many services nearing commoditization, many companies have recognized that it is more important than ever to find new ways to bring the full and unique value of the network to their customers. In particular, these companies are seeking new solutions to help them more effectively up-sell and/or cross-sell their products, services, content, and applications, successfully launch new products, and create long-term value in new business models.
One traditional approach for marketing a particular product or service to telecommunications customers includes broadcasting a variety of generic offerings to customers to see which ones are popular. However, providing these mass marketing product offerings to a customer may significantly reduce the likelihood that the product will be purchased. It may also result in marketing overload for a customer. Therefore many vendors seek better approaches to marketing their products to their customers. Some other approaches include performing various types of analysis on customer data to try to better understand a customer's needs. However, because customers tend to be described by a large number of characteristics, it is often difficult to determine how to classify and/or otherwise identify customers based on this large number of characteristics. This may be especially valid where some customers might not be adequately described by a same set of characteristics as another customer. Thus, even selecting which characteristics are relevant for analysis of a customer or group of customers may quickly become overwhelming. Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.